The Chautauqua was a traveling tent show that rolled into towns across the rural Midwest carrying speakers, preachers, musicians, and showmen, an entire circuit of self-improvement and spectacle. What it rarely carried, or at least rarely acknowledged, were the queer lives unfolding in the very same era. On October 15, a new production called Queertauqua will try to correct that omission, hauling the old tent-show format into the West Wyandotte Library for an evening it describes as scholarship meeting spectacle.
The event, "A Series of Unmentionable Acts," runs from 6 to 8 p.m. at 1737 N 82nd Street in Kansas City, Kansas, and is free and open to adults. It is the inaugural production of Queertauqua, a Kansas City performance project that reimagines the historic Chautauqua tradition as a platform for queer public humanities — part lecture, part theater, part campy ritual, with puppetry and audience participation folded in. The crowd, the organizers promise, helps decide how the story ends.
The Chautauqua movement began in 1874 as a training program for Sunday school teachers at Lake Chautauqua in upstate New York, then spread across the country in two forms: independent local assemblies and, later, the traveling "tent" Chautauquas that moved from town to town on circuits. Queertauqua's own materials nod to that lineage directly, reproducing a postcard of a Redpath-Horner Chautauqua in Fairbury, Nebraska, circa 1920, from a personal collection. The project's conceit is to take that same populist, tent-show energy — the orations, the period music, the communal gathering — and turn it toward histories that the original Chautauquas would never have staged.
The centerpiece of the evening is a reenactment of an address delivered in 1867 by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a German lawyer and journalist who is today regarded as a pioneer of sexology and of the modern gay rights movement. On August 29 of that year, Ulrichs stood before the Congress of German Jurists in Munich and argued that same-sex love was not sin, pathology, or crime but a natural and innate part of human life — an attempt, by one account, to defend it publicly on a stage where it had never been defended before. Queertauqua frames the moment as the first public coming-out story, and stages it as such.
Two other "unmentionable" acts round out the production. One is "At Saint Judas's," a one-act play by the American writer Henry Blake Fuller, published in his 1896 collection "The Puppet-Booth." Scholars have described it as the earliest American play with a central gay theme — a sacristy-set drama of longing and intrigue in which a wedding is about to take place and nothing is quite what it seems. The other is a "Womanless Wedding," a once-common form of community entertainment in which an all-male cast filled every role — bride, groom, bridesmaids, flower girls, even the mother of the bride. These mock ceremonies were typically staged as fundraisers by civic groups, churches, and clubs, and they drew crowds eager to see local dignitaries in drag. Queertauqua's version draws on a 1918 script by a Mrs. James W. Hunt, and it is here that the audience is invited into the narrative directly, in an interactive wedding sequence.
The production's tone, by its own description, moves between thoughtful, irreverent, and quietly radical, asking how history gets shaped, silenced, and re-performed. Period-accurate music and "choruses of tra-la-la" underscore vignettes the organizers call campy, melodramatic, and deathly serious at once. Before each performance, audiences get a history lecture on the source materials — part of the project's stated aim of bridging academic research and public curiosity.
Queertauqua was founded by Joseph Germain Keehn II, an artist and historian whose interdisciplinary work spans history, theater, museum studies, and queer theory. Keehn, a doctoral candidate in history, describes their approach as that of a "performance artist as historian," transforming archival silences into live spectacle. The project's origin story is local: it emerged, in the organizers' words, "from the depths of Kansas City's archives," beginning as archival research and growing into what they call a traveling laboratory. Keehn has cited the theorist Annamarie Jagose's call to locate "queer as the source, not the destination," and frames the work as centering LGBTQIA+ experience as foundational to collective history rather than as an addendum to it.
That framing carries a particular charge in the changing conservative Midwest the production says it wants to address. A Chautauqua was always a community event — something you walked into, sat down for, and experienced together. Queertauqua's choice to tour the Kansas City metro, appearing at libraries, social halls, student unions, and churches on both sides of the state line, keeps faith with that original, itinerant spirit. The October 15 stop at the West Wyandotte Library is one of several on the schedule, which also includes dates at Greenwood Social Hall, the UMKC Student Union, and other venues around the metro.
For an evening built on resurrecting silenced histories, the format is deliberately un-precious: puppets, lectures, a mock wedding, and a vote on the ending. It is history as variety show, and the audience is not a passive one. Registration is requested through the library's event page, and more information is available at Queertauqua.org.